This book is the first full-length analysis of the theory and practice of Persian singing, demonstrating the centrality of Persian elements in the music of the Islamic Middle Ages, their relevance to both contemporary and traditional Iranian music and their interaction with classical Persian poetry and metrics.

Bright Star of the West traces the life, repertoire, and influence of Joe Heaney, Ireland's greatest sean-nos ("old style") singer. Born in 1919, Joe Heaney grew up in a politically volatile time, as his native Ireland became a democracy. He found work and relative fame as a singer in London before moving to Scotland. Eventually, like many others searching for greater opportunity, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a doorman while supplementing his income with appearances at folk festivals, concerts and clubs. As his reputation and following grew, Heaney gained entry to the folk music scene and began leading workshops as a visiting artist at several universities. In 1982 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Heaney America's highest honor in folk and traditional arts, the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship. Heaney's works did not become truly popular in his homeland until many years after his death. Today he is hailed as a seminal figure of traditional song and is revered by those who follow traditional music.
Authors Sean Williams and Lillis O Laoire address larger questions about song, identity, and culture. They explore the deep ambivalence both the Irish and Irish-Americans felt toward the traditional aspects of their culture, examining other critical issues, such as gender and masculinity, authenticity, and contemporary marketing and consumption of sean-nos singing in both Ireland and the United States. Comingling Heaney's own words with the authors' comprehensive research and analysis, Bright Star of the West weaves a poignant critical biography of the man, the music, and his continuing legacy in Ireland and the United States."

A poet of rare skill, Abdur Rahim Khan-i- Khanan wrote poems in Persian, Sanskrit and Hindavi, with metaphors ranging from Giridhar to Ganga, and with humanist ideals expounded in precise and concise matras of dohas and barvais. This book catalogues the festival of the same name, to capture the manifold attributes and genius of Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan. Both the festival and the book were borne of the conservation work undertaken on Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan's tomb to protect and promote his legacy, a key objective of the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative, with support from InterGlobe Foundation. This volume also includes a remarkable selection of his verses, set to music with ragas and vernacular symphonies based on his poetry and his life.

The ritual bedhaya dances of the Central Javanese courts form a highly valued expression of Javanese culture. These stately dance forms, comprising complex choreographies executed to the accompaniment of archaic songs and gamelan music, are part of the cultural tradition of the Mataram dynasty. They have been preserved in the two main court centres of Central Java: Surakarta and Yogyakarta.
The contents of the book range from a relatively general introduction to a detailed analysis of structural, formal features of the dances. Included are theories on the origin, social context and esoteric meaning, as well as 19th and 20th century scores of performances.
The two main components of the art form, choral singing and group dancing, have each been discussed in a separate chapter. A number of song texts and choreographies, transcribed from palace manuscripts, are published for the first time. These songs represent an archaic singing style, which holds important information on the development of Javanese vocal and instrumental music.
An analysis of bedhaya choreographies which are seldom performed nowadays may serve to prevent the impending disappearance of this beautiful and stylized art form. The choreographic discussion has been visualized on a 60 minute video-tape, produced from research material which was filmed between 1983-1985. This video-tape may be ordered from the author.

Provides biographical details on some of the most talented, influential and up-and-coming artists and individuals from the world of popular music.
Now in its fully-updated and revised fifth edition, this title includes over 5,000 biographies charting the achievements and careers of pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world and country artists throughout the world.
Features include:
* Over 5,000 alphabetically arranged entries containing full biographical information: major career details, concerts, recordings and compositions, honours and contact address
* Full contact details for companies and organizations throughout the popular music industry - including record companies, management agencies, agents and promoters
* Lists of key festivals and musical events worldwide, with relevant contact details.

This book challenges the monolithic portrayals of folk music and social change under commission by making a case for 'people's music' and shows how new folk music embodies an inherently pluralistic concept of Yugoslavia's culture.
The book provides an introduction to one of the most vital forms of popular culture to emerge in east-central Europe. Based on extensive fieldwork, it engages the polemical perspectives of Yugoslav commentators and draws extensively on interpretive insights by musicians, media and music industry insiders.

for solo cello Conceived as a set, these eight songs are drawn from several Chinese regions (Shaanbei, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Hunan, and Shanxi) and represent the three main genres of mountain song, work song, and the more structured performance song aimed at professional singers. In this new arrangement for solo cello the music has been carefully refashioned for Western instruments, with writing that includes stylistic bowing and fingering to match the original style. Suitable for students at early to intermediate level, these compelling short pieces are accompanied by illuminating programme notes with a synoposis of each song.

Sonic ethnography makes a compelling argument for taking sound seriously as a crucial component of social life and as an ethnographic form of representation. This volume explores the role of sound-making and listening practices in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. With an approach that cuts across sensory anthropology, sound studies and ethnomusicology, Sonic ethnography demonstrates how acoustic tradition is made and disrupted and acoustic communities are brought together in shared temporality and space. Based extensive research, this volume provides an innovative take on soundful cultural performances such as tree rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages and more informal musical performances, with particular attention to the interactions between classic ethnographic scholarship from the past century and the local politics of heritage. Featuring stunning colour photographs and more than an hour of sound recordings, Sonic ethnography uses a unique combination of media to investigate distinctive ways of knowing, beyond more traditional ethnographic forms of representation. Two methodological chapters, respectively on music-making as creative research practice and on photo-ethnography, make the book an essential contribution for those interested in the production of sounds and still images as relational and interactive approaches to fieldwork. The pioneering anthropologist of sound, Steven Feld, collaborated to some of the research and contributed to the book an afterword and a soundscape composition. -- .

Born To Kwaito considers the meaning of kwaito music now. ‘Now’ not only as in ‘after 1994’ or the Truth Commission but as a place in the psyche of black people in post-apartheid South Africa.

This collection of essays tackles the changing meaning of the genre after its decline and its ever-contested relevance. Through rigorous historical analysis as well as threads of narrative journalism Born To Kwaito interrogates issues of artistic autonomy, the politics of language in the music, and whether the music is part of a strand within the larger feminist movement in South Africa. Candid and insightful interviews from the genre’s foremost innovators and torchbearers, such as Mandla Spikiri, Arthur Mafokate, Robbie Malinga and Lance Stehr, provide unique historical context to kwaito music’s greatest highs, most captivating hits and most devastating lows. Born To Kwaito offers up a history of the genre from below by having conversations not only with musicians but with fans, engineers, photographers and filmmakers who bore witness to a revolution.

Living in a place between criticism and biography, Born To Kwaito merges academic theories and rigorous journalism to offer a new understanding into how the genre influenced other art forms such as fashion, TV and film. The book also reflects on how some of the music’s best hits have found new life through the mouths of local hip-hop’s current kingmakers and opened kwaito up to a new generation.

The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive history of the genre but rather a present-active analysis of that history as it settles and finds its meaning.

for CCBar and piano This entertaining three-part arrangement of the popular sea shanty was written for Cambiata North West. The humorous lyrics are complemented by a jovial piano accompaniment and the piece includes several key changes, allowing different parts to take the lead with the melody.

Despite its isolation on the western edge of Europe, Ireland occupies vast amounts of space on the music maps of the world. Although deeply rooted in time and place, Irish songs, dances and instrumental traditions have a history of global travel that span the centuries. Whether carried by exiles, or distributed by commercial networks, Irish traditional music is one of the most popular World Music genres, while Clare, on Ireland's Atlantic seaboard, enjoys unrivaled status as a "Home of the Music," a mecca for tourists and aficionados eager to enjoy the authentic sounds of Ireland. For the first time, this remarkable soundscape is explored by an insider-a fourth generation Clare concertina player, uilleann piper and an internationally recognized authority on Irish traditional music. Entrusted with the testimonies, tune lore, and historic field recordings of Clare performers, Gearoid O hAllmhurain reveals why this ancient place is a site of musical pilgrimage and how it absorbed the impact of global cultural flows for centuries. These flows brought musical change inwards, while simultaneously facilitating outflows of musical change to the world beyond - in more recent times, through the music of Clare stars like Martin Hayes and the Kilfenora Ceili Band. Placing the testimony of music and music makers at the center of Irish cultural history and working from a palette of disciplines, Flowing Tides explores an Irish soundscape undergoing radical change in the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the Great Famine, from the birth of the nation state to the meteoric rise-and fall-of the Celtic Tiger. It is essential reading for all interested in Irish/Celtic music and culture.

A new approach to the mysterious ballads, and their relationship with the past. Katharine Briggs Award 2018: Runner Up The ballad genre, and its material, are frequently backward-looking in terms of subject and style: it is ideally suited to the reimagining of past events, both real and fictional. This volume addresses the past of the ballad and the past in the ballad. It challenges existing scholarship by embracing discontinuity rather than continuity, seeing the ballad as belonging to a culture of cheap printand imaginative literature rather than the rarefied construct of a mythical "folk". It finds a conscious antiquarianism and medievalism reinterpreting the genre at different stages of its literary history, at the same time as theballad itself is continually adapting to the needs of readers, singers, and audience. Chapters cover the few remaining examples of the medieval ballad, and Thomas Percy's medievalism; David Mallet's "William and Margaret" andthe beginnings of the gothic mode early in the eighteenth century; ballads of "Sir James the Rose" and the culture of cheap print in Scotland from the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth century; shipwreck ballads on the loss of the Ramillies and "Sir Patrick Spens", and the reimagining of the past in the present, with a diversion into Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"; murder ballads, special providence, and the history of mentalities from earlymodern to Victorian times. DAVID ATKINSON is Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.

Elvis Presley chose one of his songs, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," for his first single. A young Jerry Garcia traveled cross-country to audition for his band. Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, and even Frank Sinatra were fans. Considering the range of stars and styles that claim him as an influence, no single artist has had as broad an impact on American popular music as Bill Monroe.

Born in 1911 in rural Kentucky, Monroe melded the fiddle tunes, ballads, and blues of his youth into the "high lonesome" sound known today as bluegrass, making him perhaps the only performer to create an entire musical genre. His distinctive bluegrass style profoundly influenced country, early rock 'n' roll, and the folk revival of the 1960s. A Grand Ole Opry star for more than sixty years, Monroe was a searing mandolinist who redefined the instrument, a haunting high-range vocalist, and a god-like figure to generations of admirers who became famous in their own right.

When Monroe died in 1996, he was universally acclaimed as "the Father of Bluegrass," but the personal life of this taciturn figure remained largely unknown. His childhood feelings of isolation and abandonment - "lonesomeness" he called it - fueled his reckless womanizing in adulthood and inspired his most powerful compositions. From his professional breakthrough in the Monroe Brothers duet act to his bitter rivalry with former sidemen Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to his final days as a revered elder statesman of bluegrass, Monroe's career was filled with trials and triumphs. Now, veteran bluegrass journalist Richard D. Smith has interviewed a multitude of Monroe's surviving friends, lovers, colleagues, and contemporaries to create a three-dimensional portrait of this brilliant, complex, and contradictory man. Compellingly narrated and thoroughly researched, Can't You Hear Me Callin' is the definitive biography of a true giant of American music.

Explores the world of women's professional and amateur musical activity as it developed on and beyond the island of Ireland. In a story which spans several centuries, the book highlights representative composers and performers in classical music, Irish traditional music, and contemporary art music whose contributions have been marginalised in music narratives. As well as investigating the careers of public figures, this edited collection brings attention to women who engaged with and taught music in a variety of domestic settings. It also shines a spotlight on women who worked behind the scenes to build infrastructures such as festivals and educational institutions which remain at the heart of the country's musical life today. The book addresses and reconsiders ideas about the intersections of music, gender, and Irish society, including how the national emblem of the harp became recast as a symbol of Irish womanhood in the twentieth century. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 surveys women musicians in Irish society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part 2 discusses women and practice in Irish traditional music. Part 3 studies gaps and gender politics in the history of twentieth-century women composers and performers. Part 4 situates discourses of women, gender, and music in the twenty-first century. The book's contributors encompass musicologists, cultural historians, composers, and performers.

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. Bronson has collected all available tunes for each of Child's ballads, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. This is an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition.

Although the choral arrangements of the African-American spirituals constitute the largest group of folk song arrangements in western literature, they have received little scholarly attention. This book provides the needed historical and stylistic information about the spirituals and the arrangements. It traces the history and cultural roots of the genre through its inception and delineates the African and European characteristics common to the original folk songs and arrangements. Ensembles that have perpetuated the growth of the spiritual arrangements--from Fisk Jubilee Singers of the 1870s through those currently active--are chronicled as well.

Musicians, choral directors, and scholars will welcome this first complete text on the African-American spiritual genre. Annotated listings of titles provide information choral directors need to make ensemble-appropriate performance choices. Arrangements indexed by title, arranger, and subject complement the accompanying biographies and repertoire information. Well-organized and thoroughly researched, this text is a valuable addition to music, choral, multicultural, and African-American libraries.

Last Night’s Fun is a sparkling celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Ciaran Carson’s inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night’s Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it..

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career.
Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation.
Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order todemonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. Bronson has collected all available tunes for each of Child's ballads, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. This is an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition.